Yet another of the sff books with an Irish setting which I’ve had hanging around the shelves for a while, the second of a three-part YA series about a sassy American girl from Seattle who is in training to become a fairy godmother, and is sent to a mid-1990s Ireland for a learning experience involving legendary figures plucked both from the more respectable sources of lore and from Yeats and placed in the gritty tail end of the twentieth century. Scarborough’s handling of Northern Ireland is not terribly adept and her geography elsewhere but she is clearly trying hard with the Dublin and Wicklow settings, and her attempts at dialect are not too excruciating. Not a particularly challenging book, but not too objectionable either.
No, not really – though Among Others was second on both lists among Nebula nominees, it was third on LT, and fifth on GR readers, of the Hugo nominees. These are data points, nothing more.